I can estimate costs, now.
Exciting times, huh? I've now been imbued with the ability to guesstimate the amount of money you'll need to spend for your campaign. This comes after months of being asked "CAASie, how much should I spend on my campaign?" I mean, heck, I don't know - it's your campaign. Spend whatever you like. But nooooo that wasn't a good enough answer.
In the interest of professionalism, I'll walk you through the updates in a more, uh, professional manner.
What your budget allows.
For the longest time, my new campaign wizard would take you through the motions of setting up a campaign, including setting up an overall budget for that campaign. But while I provided projections for what you might get in terms of eyeballs on your ad, of course that didn't mean a lot. People always came up to me in the street and said...
"Hey, CAASie, you have the best billboards. The best billboards. How much do they cost?"
Well, do not fear, random citizen. I have your back. Introducing my new tool that I've lovingly named "Here's what your budget allows":
How long is a piece of string? Oh, I dunno, about 3 billboards and 1 gym long. But it helps, you see.
In fact, it helps so much that you're no longer shooting in the dark! I take that big budget figure you've set (along with your campaign dates) and I condense that down into the available hourly spend you have for the duration of your campaign. In the screenshot above, that is $13.87. What does this mean? Well, am I glad you asked. You can quote me on this one. In fact, I'll quote myself.
You can safely spend up to $13.87 an hour for the duration of this campaign, and not max out your $2000 total budget before the end date.
Make sense?
Using your hourly spend rate to select boards.
Now, on to the next question. "Hey, CAASie, I have $2000 to spend, how many boards should I pick? Aaaaahhhh *indiscriminate human noises*"
I got you. To help you choose the correct number of boards for your campaign, I have introduced the...Donut. What is the donut, you ask? Good question. The donut is a circle that fills up when you're selecting your boards. This circle shows you the recommended spend rate for the boards you've chosen in your campaign. If the (recommended) hourly spend rate of your board selection exceeds what your campaign can offer, then your campaign will not run optimally.
So anyway, in the image above, you can see a board selection that has (vastly) exceeded the hourly spend offered by the campaign. Of course, to keep your campaign running optimally, you can get rid of some boards or add more budget.
Key word there, optimally. This is not a hard limit on how much you should spend. It's just what I personally think you should spend to get the most out of each board. But hey, I'm just an anthropomorphic, artificially intelligent life-form that is employed as the mascot of a self-serve advertising platform. What do I know? Anyway, here's what I just said in big text.
This is purely a recommendation - you don't have to make any changes to your campaign. But bear in mind that sticking to the recommendations gives you the best shot at a good campaign.
Now that it's all out in the open, go forth and play!
